Sustainable seabed mining: guidelines and a new concept for Atlantis II Deep

The feasibility of exploiting seabed resources is subject to the engineering solutions, and economic prospects. Due to rising metal prices, predicted mineral scarcities and unequal allocations of resources in the world, vast research programmes on the exploration and exploitation of seabed minerals are presented in 1970s. Very few studies have been published after the 1980s, when predictions were not fulfilled. The attention grew back in the last decade with marine mineral mining being in research and commercial focus again and the first seabed mining license for massive sulphides being granted in Papua New Guinea’s Exclusive Economic Zone.Research on seabed exploitation and seabed mining is a complex transdisciplinary field that demands for further attention and development. Since the field links engineering, economics, environmental, legal and supply chain research, it demands for research from a systems point of view. This implies the application of a holistic sustainability framework of to analyse the feasibility of engineering systems. The research at hand aims to close this gap by developing such a framework and providing a review of seabed resources. Based on this review it identifies a significant potential for massive sulphides in inactive hydrothermal vents and sediments to solve global resource scarcities. The research aims to provide background on seabed exploitation and to apply a holistic systems engineering approach to develop general guidelines for sustainable seabed mining of polymetallic sulphides and a new concept and solutions for the Atlantis II Deep deposit in the Red Sea.The research methodology will start with acquiring a broader academic and industrial view on sustainable seabed mining through an online survey and expert interviews on seabed mining. In addition, the Nautilus Minerals case is reviewed for lessons learned and identification of challenges. Thereafter, a new concept for Atlantis II Deep is developed that based on a site specific assessment.The research undertaken in this study provides a new perspective regarding sustainable seabed mining. The main contributions of this research are the development of extensive guidelines for key issues in sustainable seabed mining as well as a new concept for seabed mining involving engineering systems, environmental risk mitigation, economic feasibility, logistics and legal aspects

SeACo-Paraformer: A Non-Autoregressive ASR System with Flexible and Effective Hotword Customization Ability

Hotword customization is one of the important issues remained in ASR field - it is of value to enable users of ASR systems to customize names of entities, persons and other phrases. The past few years have seen both implicit and explicit modeling strategies for ASR contextualization developed. While these approaches have performed adequately, they still exhibit certain shortcomings such as instability in effectiveness. In this paper we propose Semantic-augmented Contextual-Paraformer (SeACo-Paraformer) a novel NAR based ASR system with flexible and effective hotword customization ability. It combines the accuracy of the AED-based model, the efficiency of the NAR model, and the excellent performance in contextualization. In 50,000 hours industrial big data experiments, our proposed model outperforms strong baselines in customization and general ASR tasks. Besides, we explore an efficient way to filter large scale incoming hotwords for further improvement. The source codes and industrial models proposed and compared are all opened as well as two hotword test sets.Comment: updated draf

Pink: Unveiling the Power of Referential Comprehension for Multi-modal LLMs

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various multi-modal tasks. Nevertheless, their performance in fine-grained image understanding tasks is still limited. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new framework to enhance the fine-grained image understanding abilities of MLLMs. Specifically, we present a new method for constructing the instruction tuning dataset at a low cost by leveraging annotations in existing datasets. A self-consistent bootstrapping method is also introduced to extend existing dense object annotations into high-quality referring-expression-bounding-box pairs. These methods enable the generation of high-quality instruction data which includes a wide range of fundamental abilities essential for fine-grained image perception. Moreover, we argue that the visual encoder should be tuned during instruction tuning to mitigate the gap between full image perception and fine-grained image perception. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method. For instance, our model exhibits a 5.2% accuracy improvement over Qwen-VL on GQA and surpasses the accuracy of Kosmos-2 by 24.7% on RefCOCO_val. We have also attained the top rank on the leaderboard of MMBench. This promising performance is achieved by training on only publicly available data, making it easily reproducible. The models, datasets, and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SY-Xuan/Pink

Gene Transfer of Calcitonin Gene-Related Peptide Inhibits Macrophages and Inflammatory Mediators in Vein Graft Disease

Vein graft disease is a chronic inflammatory disease and limits the late results of coronary revascularization. Calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) inhibits macrophages infiltrated and inflammatory mediators, we hypothesized that transfected CGRP gene inhibits macrophages infiltrated and inflammatory mediators in vein graft disease. Autologous rabbit jugular vein grafts were incubated ex vivo in a solution of mosaic adeno-associated virus vectors containing CGRP gene (AAV2/1.CGRP) 、escherichia coli lac Z gene (AAV2/1.LacZ) or saline and then interposed in the carotid artery. Intima/media ratio were evaluated at postoperative 4 weeks, Macrophages were marked with CD68 antibody by immunocytochemistry. Inflammatory mediators were mensurated with real-time PCR. Neointimal thickening was significantly suppressed in AAV2/1.CGRP group. Macrophages infiltrated and inflammatory mediators monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1)、tumor necrosis factorα(TNF-α)、inducible nitricoxide synthase (iNOS)、matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9) was significantly suppressed in AAV2/1.CGRP group.Gene transfected AAV2/1.CGRP suppressed neointimal hyperplasia in vein graft disease by suppressed macrophages infiltrated and inflammatory mediators

Sensitivity of atmospheric aerosol scavenging to precipitation intensity and frequency in the context of global climate change

Wet deposition driven by precipitation is an important sink for atmospheric aerosols and soluble gases. We investigate the sensitivity of atmospheric aerosol lifetimes to precipitation intensity and frequency in the context of global climate change. Our sensitivity model simulations, through some simplified perturbations to precipitation in the GEOS-Chem model, show that the removal efficiency and hence the atmospheric lifetime of aerosols have significantly higher sensitivities to precipitation frequencies than to precipitation intensities, indicating that the same amount of precipitation may lead to different removal efficiencies of atmospheric aerosols. Combining the long-term trends of precipitation patterns for various regions with the sensitivities of atmospheric aerosol lifetimes to various precipitation characteristics allows us to examine the potential impacts of precipitation changes on atmospheric aerosols. Analyses based on an observational dataset show that precipitation frequencies in some regions have decreased in the past 14 years, which might increase the atmospheric aerosol lifetimes in those regions. Similar analyses based on multiple reanalysis meteorological datasets indicate that the changes of precipitation intensity and frequency over the past 30 years can lead to perturbations in the atmospheric aerosol lifetimes by 10% or higher at the regional scale